Who Killed Martin Luther King?

Editor’s Note:
Douglas Valentine worked as a researcher for the King family and
testified at the trial about suspicions that Dr. King might have been
under U.S. government surveillance at the time of the assassination.By Douglas Valentine, ConsortiumNewsOn
Dec. 8, a jury in Memphis, Tenn., deliberated for only three hours
before deciding that the long-held official version of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s assassination was wrong.
The jury’s verdict implicated a retired Memphis businessman and
government agencies in a conspiracy to kill the civil rights giant.Though the trial
testimony had received little press attention outside of the Memphis
area, the startling outcome drew an immediate rebuttal from defenders of
the official finding: that James Earl Ray acted alone or possibly as
part of a low-level conspiracy of a few white racists.Leading newspapers
across the country disparaged the December verdict as the product of a
flawed conspiracy theory given a one-sided presentation. The Washington Post even lumped the conspiracy proponents in with those who insist Adolf Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide.“The deceit of
history, whether it occurs in the context of Holocaust denial or in an
effort to rewrite the story of Dr. King’s death, is a dangerous impulse
for which those committed to reasoned debate and truth cannot sit
still,” a Post editorial read. “The more quickly and completely this jury’s discredited verdict is forgotten the better.” [WP, Dec. 12, 1999]For its part, the
King family cited the verdict as a way of dealing with its personal
grief. “We hope to put this behind us and move on with our lives,” said
Dexter King, speaking on behalf of the family. “This is a time for
reconciliation, healing and closure.”But should closure
— or forgetfulness – follow a verdict that finds the federal government
complicit in a conspiracy to assassinate one of this nation’s most
historic figures? Are there indeed legitimate reasons to doubt the
official story? And how should Americans evaluate this unorthodox trial,
its evidence and the verdict?Without
doubt, the trial in Memphis lacked the neat wrap-up of a Perry Mason
drama. The testimony was sometimes imprecise, dredging up disputed
memories more than three decades old.Some testimony was
hearsay; long depositions by deceased or absent figures were read into
the record; and some witnesses had changed their stories over time amid
accusations of profiteering.There was a
messiness that often accompanies complex cases of great notoriety. The
plaintiff’s case also did not encounter a rigorous challenge from Lewis
K. Garrison, the attorney for defendant Loyd Jowers.Garrison shares
the doubts about the official version, and his client, Jowers, has
implicated himself in the conspiracy, although insisting his role was
tangential. Some critics compared the trial to a professional wrestling
match with the defense putting up only token resistance. Yet, despite the
shortcomings, the trial was the first time that evidence from the King
assassination was presented to a jury in a court of law. The verdict
demonstrated that 12 citizens — six blacks and six whites — did not find
the notion of a wide-ranging conspiracy to kill King as ludicrous as
many commentators did.The trial
suggested, too, that the government erred by neglecting the larger issue
of public interest in the mystery of who killed Martin Luther King Jr.
Instead the government simply affirmed and reaffirmed James Earl Ray’s
guilty plea for three decades. Insisting that the evidence pointed
clearly toward Ray as the assassin, the government never agreed to
vacate Ray’s guilty plea and allow for a full-scale trial, a possibility
that ended when Ray died from liver disease in 1998.At that point, the
King family judged that a wrongful death suit against Jowers was the
last chance for King’s murder to be considered by a jury. From the
start, the family encountered harsh criticism from many editorial
writers who judged the conspiracy allegations nutty.The King family’s
suspicions, however, derived from one fact that was beyond dispute: that
powerful elements of the federal government indeed were out to get
Martin Luther King Jr. in the years before his murder.In particular, FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover despised King as a dangerous radical who
threatened the national security and needed to be neutralized by almost
any means necessary.After King’s “I
have a dream speech” in 1963, FBI assistant director William Sullivan
called King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the
country.” Hoover reacted to King’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 with the
comment that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.”The documented
record is clear that the FBI and other federal agencies aggressively
investigated King as an enemy of the state. His movements were
monitored; his phones were tapped; his rooms were bugged; derogatory
information about his personal life was leaked to discredit him; he was
blackmailed about extramarital affairs; he was sent a message suggesting
that he commit suicide.“There is only one
way out for you,” the message read. “You better take it before your
filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”These FBI
operations escalated as black uprisings burned down parts of American
cities and as the nation’s campuses erupted in protests against the
Vietnam War. To many young Americans, black and white, King was a man of
unparalleled stature and extraordinary courage. He was the leader who
could merge the civil rights and anti-war movements.Increasingly, King
saw the two issues as intertwined, as President Lyndon Johnson siphoned
off anti-poverty funds to prosecute the costly war in Vietnam.On April 15, 1967,
less than a year before his murder, King concluded a speech to an
anti-war rally with a call on the Johnson administration to “stop the
bombing.” King also began planning a Poor People’s March on Washington
that would put a tent city on the Mall and press the government for a
broad redistribution of the nation’s wealth.Covert government
operations worked to disrupt both the anti-war and civil rights
movements by infiltrating them with spies and agents provocateurs. The
FBI’s COINTELPRO sought to neutralize what were called “black
nationalist hate groups,” counting among its targets King’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.One FBI memo
fretted about the possible emergence of a black “Messiah” who could
“unify and electrify” the various black militant groups. The memo listed
King as “a real contender” for this leadership role.With
this backdrop came the chaotic events in Memphis in early 1968 as King
lent his support to a sanitation workers’ strike marred by violence.The government’s
surveillance of King in Memphis — by both federal agents and city police
— would rest at the heart of the case more than three decades later.
On April 4, 1968, at 6 p.m., King emerged from his room on the second
floor of the Lorraine Motel. As he leaned over the balcony, King was
struck by a single bullet and died.As word of his
death spread, riots exploded in cities across the country. Fiery smoke
billowed from behind the Capitol dome. Government officials struggled to
restore order and police searched for King’s assassin.One of those
questioned was restaurant owner Loyd Jowers whose Jim’s Grill was below
the rooming house where James Earl Ray had stayed and from where
authorities contend the fatal shot was fired.Jowers told the
police he knew nothing about the shooting, but had heard a noise that
“sounded like something that fell in the kitchen.” [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]The international
manhunt ended at London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, when
Scotland Yard detained Ray for carrying an illegal firearm. Ray was
extradited back to the United States to stand trial as King’s lone
assassin.The FBI insisted
that it could find no solid evidence indicating that Ray was part of any
conspiracy. But the authorities contended they had a strong case
against Ray, including a recovered rifle with Ray’s fingerprints. The
rifle fired bullets of the same caliber as the one that killed King.While Ray sat in
jail, Jowers’s name popped up again in the case. On Feb. 10, 1969, Betty
Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill, implicated Jowers in the
assassination. She said Jowers found a gun behind the café and may
actually have shot King. Two days later, however, Spates recanted. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]On March 10, 1969, Ray accepted the advice of his attorney and pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.Three days later,
however, he wrote a letter to the judge asking that his guilty plea be
set aside. He claimed that he was innocent and that his lawyer had
misled him into making the plea.Ray began telling a
complex tale in which he was duped by an operative he knew only as
“Raul.” Ray claimed that Raul arranged the assassination and set Ray up
to take the fall.Government
investigators rejected Raul’s existence and insisted that Ray was simply
spinning a story to escape a long prison term. The courts rejected
Ray’s request for a trial. As far as the legal system of Memphis was
concerned, the case was closed.But there did appear to be weaknesses in the prosecution case that might have shown up at trial.
For instance, Charles Stephens, a key witness placing Ray at the scene
of the crime, appeared to have been drunk at the time and had offered
contradictory accounts of the assailant’s description, according to a
reporter who encountered him after the shooting. [For details, see
William F. Pepper’s Orders to Kill.]Outside the government, other skeptical investigators began to pick at the loose ends of the case.In 1971, investigative writer Harold Weisberg published the first dissenting account of the official King case in his book, Frame Up. Weisberg
noted problems with the physical evidence, including the FBI’s failure
to match the death slug to the alleged murder weapon.Questions about
the case mounted when the federal government declassified records
revealing the intensity of FBI hatred for King. The combination of
factual discrepancies and a possible government motive led some of
King’s friends to suspect a conspiracy.In 1977, civil
rights leader Ralph Abernathy encouraged lawyer William F. Pepper to
meet with Ray and hear out the convict’s tale. Pepper said he took on
the assignment in part because he had encouraged King to join in
publicly criticizing the Vietnam War and felt a sense of responsibility
for King’s fate.Responding to
growing public doubts about the official accounts of the three major
assassinations that rocked the nation in the 1960s, Congress also agreed
to re-examine the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F.
Kennedy and King.In congressional
testimony, however, Ray came off poorly. Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, the
chairman of the investigating committee, said Ray’s performance
convinced him that Ray indeed was the assassin and that there was no
government role in the murder.The panel did
leave open the possibility that other individuals were involved, but
limited the scope of any conspiracy to maybe Ray’s brothers, Jerry and
John, or two St. Louis racists who allegedly put a bounty on King’s
life. But others on the panel, such as Rep. Walter Fauntroy, D-D.C.,
continued to harbor doubts about the congressional findings.After a decade of
on-and-off work on the case, Pepper decided to press ahead. He agreed to
represent Ray and filed a habeas corpus suit on his behalf.Also, in 1993, a
mock television trial presented the evidence against Ray to a “jury,”
which returned the convict’s “acquittal.” Pepper asserted that the
government’s case was so weak that Ray would win a regular trial, too.Jowers reentered
the controversy as well, reversing his initial statement to police in
which he denied knowledge of the assassination. On Dec. 16, 1993, in a
nationally televised ABC-TV interview, Jowers claimed that a
Mafia-connected Memphis produce dealer, Frank C. Liberto, had paid him
$100,000 to arrange King’s murder.But Liberto was then dead and the man named by Jowers as the paid hit-man denied any role in the murder. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]In 1995, Pepper published an account of his investigation in Orders to Kill.
The book contended that the conspirators behind the assassination
included elements of the Mafia, the FBI and U.S. Army intelligence.Pepper located
witnesses with new evidence. John McFerren, a black grocery owner, was
quoted as saying that an hour before the assassination, he overheard
Liberto order someone over the phone to “shoot the son of a bitch when
he comes on the balcony.”But Pepper’s
credibility suffered when he cited anonymous sources in identifying
William Eidson as a deceased member of a U.S. Army assassination squad
that was present in Memphis on the day King died. ABC-TV researchers
found Eidson to be alive and furious at Pepper’s insinuations about his
alleged role in the King assassination.Still, the King
family — especially King’s children — grew increasingly interested in
the controversy. On March 27, 1997, King’s younger son, Dexter, sat down
with Ray in prison, listened to Ray’s story and announced his belief
that Ray was telling the truth.In a separate
meeting with the King family, Jowers claimed that a police officer shot
King from behind Jim’s Grill. The officer then handed the smoking rifle
to Jowers, the former restaurant owner said.The authorities in
Tennessee, however, continued to rebuff Ray’s appeals for a trial.
Prosecutors concluded that Jowers’s story lacked credibility and may
have been motivated by greed. Ray’s pleas for his day in court finally
ended with his death from liver disease.On
Oct. 2, 1998, the King family filed a wrongful death suit against
Jowers. The trial opened in November 1999, attracting scant attention
from the national press.Jowers, 73,
attended only part of the trial and did not testify. His admissions of
complicity were recounted by others who had spoken with him.Former United
Nations ambassador Andrew Young testified that he found Jowers sincere
during a four-hour conversation about the assassination. “I got the
impression this was a man who was very sick [and who] wanted to go to
confession to get his soul right,” Young said.According to
Young, Jowers said he had served Memphis police officers and federal
agents when they met in Jowers’s restaurant before the assassination.
Jowers also recounted his story of Mafia money going to a man who
delivered a rifle to Jowers’s café.After the
assassination, the man, a Memphis police officer, handed the rifle to
Jowers through a back door, according to Jowers’s account. [Scripps Howard News Service, Nov. 18, 1999]A former state
judge, Joe Brown, took the stand to challenge the government’s
confidence that Ray’s rifle was the murder weapon. During one of Ray’s
earlier court hearings, Brown had ordered new ballistic tests on the gun
and the bullet that killed King.The results had
been inconclusive, with the forensics experts unable to rule whether the
gun was the murder weapon or wasn’t. In his testimony, however, Brown
asserted that the sight on the rifle was so poor that it couldn’t have
killed King.“This weapon
literally could not hit the broadside of a barn,” Brown said. But he
acknowledged that he had no formal training as a weapons expert.The jury also
heard testimony that federal authorities were monitoring the area around
the Lorraine Motel. Carthel Weeden, a former captain with the Memphis
Fire Department, said that on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, two men
appeared at the fire station across from the motel and showed the
credentials of U.S. Army officers.The men then
carried briefcases, which they said held photographic equipment, up to
the roof of the station. Weeden said the men positioned themselves
behind a parapet approximately 18 inches high, a position that gave them
a clear view of the Lorraine Motel and the rooming house window from
which Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed King.They also would
have had a view of the area behind Jim’s Grill. But what happened to any
possible photographs remains a mystery. Weeden added that he was never
questioned by local or federal authorities.Former Rep.
Fauntroy also testified at the Kings-Jowers trial. Fauntroy complained
that the 1978 congressional inquiry was not as thorough as the public
might have thought. The committee dropped the investigation when funding
dried up and left some promising leads unexplored, he told the jury.“Had we had
[another] six months, we may well have gotten to the bottom of
everything,” Fauntroy testified on Nov. 29. “We didn’t have the time to
investigate leads we had established but could not follow. … We asked
the Justice Department to follow up … and to see if there was more than
just a low-level conspiracy.” Other witnesses
described a strange withdrawal of police protection from around the
motel about an hour before King’s death. A group of black homicide
detectives, who had served as King’s bodyguards on previous visits to
Memphis, were kept from performing those duties in April 1968.In his summation,
trying to minimize his client’s alleged role in the conspiracy, Garrison
asked the jury, “would the owner of a greasy spoon restaurant, and a
lone assassin, could they pull away officers from the scene of an
assassination? Could they put someone up on the top of the fire
station?”The cumulative
evidence apparently convinced the jury. After the trial, juror Robert
Tucker told a reporter that the 12 jurors agreed that the assassination
was too complex for one person to handle. He noted the testimony about
the police guards being removed and Army agents observing King from the
firehouse.
“All of these things added up,” Tucker said. [AP, Dec. 9, 1999]Even
before the trial ended, the media controversy about the case had begun.
Many reporters viewed the conspiracy allegations as half-baked and the
defense as offering few challenges to the breathtaking assertions.The jury, for
instance, heard little about the gradual evolution of Jowers’s story,
which began with a flat denial and grew over time with the addition of
sometimes conflicting details.In a commentary on
the case, history writer John McMillian reaffirmed his confidence in
Ray’s guilt and his certainty that the wrongful death suit was
“misguided.” But McMillian noted that the King family’s suspicions about
the government’s actions were grounded in the reality of the FBI’s
campaign to ruin King’s reputation.“While King was
alive, he and his family suffered needlessly from slimy government
subterfuge,” McMillian wrote. Though believing Ray was “justly punished
for being King’s assassin,” McMillian wrote, “the FBI has never been
held accountable for a much more lengthy, expensive and organized
campaign to destroy King.” [The Commercial Appeal, Nov. 26, 1999]Other critics
focused on Pepper. Court TV analyst Harriet Ryan noted that the King
family’s motivations appeared sincere, but “the same cannot be said for
Pepper [who] stands to gain from sales of his book.”
Gerald Posner, author of the conspiracy-debunking book, Killing the Dream, argued
that the trial “bordered on the absurd” due to a “lethargic” defense
and a passive judge who allowed “most everything to come into the
record.”Posner also cited
money as the motive behind the case. He accused Pepper of misleading the
King family for personal gain and suggested that the King family went
along as part of a scheme to sell the movie rights to film producer
Oliver Stone.Pepper responded
that a film project that the King family had discussed with Warner Bros.
had fallen through before the civil case was brought. He noted, too,
that the family sought and received only a token jury award of $100.
[WP, Dec. 18, 1999]But the back-and-forth quickly muddied whatever new understanding the public might have gained from the trial.Part of the
confusion could be traced to the effectiveness of Posner and other
critics in making their case in a wide array of newspapers and on
television talk shows. Some of the blame, however, must fall on Pepper
and his flawed investigation that did include some erroneous
assertions. The larger tragedy
may be that the serious questions about King’s assassination have
receded even deeper into the historical mist.As Court TV
analyst Ryan noted, “Whatever theories Garrison and Pepper get into the
record … it is not likely they will change the general belief that Ray
was responsible.”Though Ryan may be
right, another perspective came in 1996 when two admirers of Dr. King —
the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. and actor Mike Farrell — wrote a
fund-raising letter seeking support for a fuller investigation of the
assassination.They argued that
the full story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was too
important to the country to leave any stone unturned. They stated:“There are buried
truths in our history which continue to insist themselves back into the
light, perhaps because they hold within them the nearly dead embers of
what we were once intended to be as a nation.”Douglas Valentine is author of the 1990 book, The Phoenix Program.